Natural Solutions for Homestead Problems

Do you have challenges on the homestead that require some management, but you don’t have a lot of cash or tools to immediately remedy the situation? Have you considered natural solutions for these homestead problems? Here are four areas of the homestead where we experience common challenges – the garden, land, livestock, and the home – and we can apply permaculture principles to turns these liabilities into assets with resources we already have on the homestead.

As more people are beginning to think seriously about more economical and better-sourced energy, we’ve become used to some natural solutions to common energy problems. For example, solar panels have become common place and are easily recognizable. The sun is a huge nuclear reactor in the sky that shines down on us for free!

Water is also commonly accepted as a source of hydro-electric power in our day using the same basic technology as the Romans used anciently.

The truth is, nature has long held the solutions to many of our most basic problems! When you take these problems on a global, state, or even city level, applying these ideas can become convoluted in regulation and complex in application.

However, when we bring these solutions to the more localized and focused challenges we face on the homestead, even the most inexperienced among us can begin to use these ideas right away. No need for years of university training because we can easily use what the land is already providing!

Seem too good to be true? Come explore these ideas with me and see what you think after you’ve read through the material here. If you have ideas of your own or further questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

As we’ve pointed out in other articles, the first thing we need to do before we even try to identify natural solutions for homestead issues is to learn to observe the homestead and all of its parts. If we’re new to this idea, permaculture can help!

Permaculture is a design methodology that can help train our brains to search out permanent, perennial, regenerative, natural solutions to homestead challenges. Observation and good design can bring you around to the solution for pretty much any problem! In fact, in permaculture, you often here it said that the problem IS the solution!

To learn more about the basics of permaculture, peruse the following when you have time:

A Short Introduction to Permaculture

Permaculture Zones on the Homestead

Plan a Permaculture Homestead Layout

Learn to Observe to Find the Best Natural Solutions

The first principle of permaculture is to: Observe and Interact.

Observing and getting involved in the natural world of the homestead allow us to do a number of useful things, one of which is to support and even replicate the natural processes and systems that are already functioning successfully on our land.

Once we see how well nature manages her own “house”, we can more easily adopt her systems to our homesteads.

This process is called biomimicry – or mimicking what we see in nature – and is explained more fully in our first permaculture principle article Observe & Interact: Biomimicry on the Homestead.

Some Reasons to Seek a Natural Solution

Instead of buying a commercial product or acquiring an expensive piece of equipment, when we look for natural solutions, we’re searching for ways to utilize what nature is already doing to solve problems we’re experiencing.

Simple reasons to seek a natural solution include that they are:

easy to access (local to us)
cheap (don’t require much, if any, capital*)
simple to understand

*Capital as defined in permaculture includes financial capital like cash. However, it also encompasses assets like experience, time, labor, emotional energy and more. A solution may not cost you dollars but it can rob you of time and labor if it turns out to be poor.

When you look for natural solutions, you’ll be looking for ways in which the natural world can help solve everyday homestead challenges by doing what it already does easily. Let’s talk about that more so that it will make more sense.

I’m going to take you through a few examples that I hope will resonate with every homestead reader in some way or other.

Homestead Challenges & Natural Solutions Suggestions

Let’s just run through some very basic homestead problems or challenges that can be solved with the renewable resources we’ve mentioned, as well as some others.

Here’s a very straightforward one: If our wallets are stretched trying to purchase all the food our family needs to eat, what natural solution can we use to alleviate this problem?

Here are some ideas:

Grow a vegetable garden for food production this season.
Plant an orchard, including berries and nuts for long-term yields.
Learn to forage wild plants for free in our local environment.
Build a solar dehydrator to preserve the surplus foods we have, so nothing goes to waste in the kitchen.

You’ll notice that I have not once indicated that these solutions require no effort at all. Rather, they fulfill our requirements for natural resources, which are that they be:

easy to access (local to us)
cheap (doesn’t require much, if any, capital*)
simple to understand

What Are Some Examples of Natural Solutions on the Homestead?

Here are a few natural solutions from our experience, but can you think of some from your homestead? Please share anything that’s worked for you in the comments below!

In the Garden

Challenge: Soggy ground.

Solution: Water logged ground can host water loving plants, so it needn’t be viewed as a liability. Rain gardens can be designed to capture and use the water in the landscape with pollinator plants, as well as water-loving food plants like elder berry.

If you experience the opposite problem and have very parched land, you can design systems to bring the gray water from your home out into your garden. Use water that would otherwise be wasted to renew the water in your land!

Challenge: Wild plants and weeds cover your homestead.

Solution: Use mulch and compost to smother plants in the vegetable garden rows and beds. In more open spaces, use livestock like poultry and goats to consume wild plants.

In extreme cases as with Bermuda grass, a more long term plan that includes strategic placement of perennial plants, ground cover plants, and mulch may be needed. A lot of patience will also be required, but at least this program will work over time; whereas, herbicide will barely touch Bermuda grass.

Challenge: Garden pests are eating our veggies!

Solution: The garden is a system that requires balance in order to thrive, just like any healthy system. You will carry a certain population of “bad bugs” even in a healthy, permaculture garden. The key is to keep the balance of pests to predators so that the pests don’t overrun the system.

In permaculture, we do this by guild planting – a more commonly known phrase is companion planting. One of the benefits of a biologically diverse garden is that pest control naturally happens. Imbalances pop up, but they’re easier to zero in on and fix in a natural systems, as opposed to using a pesticide that just kills every bug indiscriminately.

To learn more about this topic, please visit our article: Create a Vegetable Garden Guild in 7 Steps.

On the Land

Challenge: We have lots of pasture but no tractor (which means tall grasses that equal fire hazard and tick/chigger populations that are dangerous to humans and animals).

Solution: Livestock and be relied upon to deal with most pasture grasses. This does take some observation and adjustment, since certain livestock is better suited to certain grasses and weeds. Two good books for homesteaders serious about this subject are:

Dirt to Soil, by Gabe Brown
Restoration Agriculture, by Mark Shephard

(I usually buy my books used from Thriftbooks.com, FYI.)

To get started, try goats and chickens rotating on your pasture. Sheep and turkeys are also effective. If you don’t own your own livestock, consider renting a neighbors’ or working out a trade deal.

If you only have room for poultry but don’t have long-term housing, meat chickens can put on enough weight during the growing season to harvest at the end. They clean your pasture area and then you eat them when they’re done. You don’t need permanent housing in this scenario; only something to see them through summer rains and heat while they keep the area clipped and tick/chigger free.

With Livestock

Challenge: Our homestead vision and energy wavers where it comes to livestock. We get tired of dealing with them!

Solution: Children’s natural energy and love for animals can be channeled into help with livestock chores. Not only does their youth aid our labor, but their passion keeps us inspired.

While we’re on this topic, children can be applied to pretty nearly every homestead burnout problem we have! They are endlessly creative, energetic, observant, and fascinated by the natural world.

Even if your teenagers have gotten to the “I’m too cool to be impressed” phase, they’re still younger, stronger, and more flexible than you are at this point! Always ask for their help so they know they’re part of your homestead team.

If you don’t have children of your own, invite some onto the homestead via homestead/farm tours and other educational opportunities for homeschoolers and other local children. They will revitalize you (even if they exhaust you)!

Challenge: We don’t have enough money for feed for our chickens and pigs.

Solutions: We can select varieties and breeds that naturally forage more effectively like ducks and geese instead of chickens. Or kunekune pigs that can forage their rations on their own with enough pasture and forest. Similarly, we can glean from farmers’ harvested fields or restaurants old veggies to augment our livestock’s diet.

We can also opt to raise homestead livestock like rabbits that have a higher feed to muscle ratio, making every morsel of food count. Similarly, we can sprout whatever grain ration we can afford to increase nutrition, as well as allow animals like goats to browse our weedy patches.

With the Home

Challenge: The dryer just broke.

Solution: A line drying system can be set up outside to capture solar radiation to dry the clothes for free. This method of line drying can even be used where it freezes in winter. You can also use clothes drying racks and other tricks to line dry inside using the air in your home.

Challenge: The summer is hot.

Solutions: In the garden, we can use taller/heat resistant plants like tomatoes to shade sensitive ones like lettuce. We can also design for vines to shade decks and outdoor spaces. When a homestead is new, trees should always be included in the landscape design in hot summer areas.

Also, we can actually use the heat to suit homestead needs, as in utilizing the heat from a greenhouse in summer to dry firewood for the winter. A harvest of green firewood can be quickly seasoned in a greenhouse or hoop house so that space doesn’t go to waste in summer when it’s too hot to grow anything inside.

If we’re building our home from the ground up, we can use straw bale and cobb with natural finish plasters to keep our building naturally breathable, insulated, and self-regulating when it comes to temperature and humidity.

Also, we can provide eaves and porches to the protect house from summer sun, as well as orienting the house to better shade it.

Challenge: My pipes froze this winter and now my toilet won’t flush!

Solution: Use a simple bucket toilet system that allows for composting of the humanure. After a year of careful seasoning, your waste can be used in the orchard as compost. This is, literally, creating capital from poop!

Here are two quality articles for further study on this idea:

Composting Toilets on the Homestead – written from the point of view of an off grid homesteaders presenting different options and things to think about.

DIY “Super Clean Composting Toilet Design – from Midwest Permaculture where they use these for their off grid camping sites. Incidentally, I took my second permaculture design certificate course from these guys and loved it – I highly recommend it!!

We’ve actually used this bucket toilet system several times, including when pipes have frozen, but also when a sceptic system went out. I’ve used them multiple times at various off-grid workshops and demonstrations.

I first discovered these toilets during an interview with an off-grid homesteader while doing research for our book, The Do It Yourself Homestead. Jaimie, of American Homestead, related to me that she actually loved her bucket toilet better than her on-grid, standard toilet because it was so much easier to clean!

Her real-life perspective got me thinking about how the solutions to our common homestead challenges may be found more easily by embracing a simpler way of thinking.

You can read the results of those interviews by grabbing a copy of the book for yourself!

You can also read an abbreviated version in the article Things to Think About Before Going Off Grid.

Follow Up Assignment & The Big Question

Do you remember our review question from the article: Renewable Resources: Solutions for Homestead Problems (5th Permaculture Principle)? This might be the most important one to ask when considering natural solutions to homestead problems! Here’s a quote from the article:

The follow up suggested assignment for this permaculture principle is to first ask yourself the most important question to help you identify renewable resources on your homestead that can help with the challenges you will be facing this year. Here’s the question:

What does nature already do and enjoy doing that you can put to work for you;
not by extortion, but by allowing it do naturally do its thing?

We then gave you a “homework” assignment that involved writing out your most common homestead challenges and then brainstorming possible natural solutions. You can do this freehand, but to make it easier, we created a free workbook for you to download and print when you join our newsletter family below.

You can slip these right into your homestead journal when they’re completed for constant reference. You can also print more any time you need them.

FYI, if you’re already a member of our newsletter family, these worksheets will be in the free newsletter library. The access information for the library is at the bottom of every email newsletter.

The newsletter comes with access to all the other resources in the member library – there are a lot in there for you to use. We look forward to seeing you there!

If you have natural solutions to homestead issues that you’ve used with success, please include them in the comments below so that other readers can be inspired and assisted towards a more self-sufficient lifestyle!